Many organizations embracing cloud technology are exploring the possibility of outsourcing cloud infrastructure, which corresponds with expanding the availability of these services from cloud providers. When you’re anticipating a move to managed cloud infrastructure, how do you determine which provider is the best fit?
Start by reviewing your business needs. Before investing in cloud infrastructure services, you need to determine what you’re hoping to achieve with this step. No public infrastructure service is one-size-fits-all and no one solution is going to fix all problems. It’s most effective when utilized as a part of a bigger digital strategy.
First, your company should look at your business strategy then consider what digital elements are necessary to deliver on the objectives, including future classifications for data, applications, and workloads. This process will help you determine what you need in terms of security, visibility, automation, mobility, and geographic requirements. Rather than simply pushing your cloud infrastructure management onto a provider, you’ll be engaged in a process of optimizing your IT environment and aligning people and processes for best practices.
Consider a few key aspects of your cloud infrastructure needs and whether a provider can supply them. There are some important questions you should ask of your cloud infrastructure provider:
- Is the provider able to cover service for all of the markets you handle? Get a clear explanation of their scale and geographic coverage.
- Does the provider have the level of credibility and experience that would encourage you to put your trust in their services?
- Determine the level of openness in the provider’s offerings.
- What’s the strength of the provider’s partnerships with other important industry leaders?
- Does the provider offer flexibility for running your operations in a hybrid environment with some of your services kept in-house and others on the public cloud?
- What systems or services are available for achieving improved productivity and efficiency within your organization?
The cloud infrastructure should meet your current needs but also offer a broad variety of services that allow you flexibility for future planning. While you may have relatively standard needs right now, in six months you could require SAP applications or other services that demand a different set of options.
Another important consideration is the frequency at which releases occur with the provider because you will likely have a long-term plan that projects your future requirements for your infrastructure. Be sure that the provider can match your expectations.
Determine the level of service you can expect. Your assessment should include reliability, availability, and security. Some of the metrics you receive will detail input/output operations per second, as well as data for compute and memory, bandwidth and load-balancing capabilities.
More importantly, you should consider how storage, compute, and networking is used to solve business problems through the provider’s clients. This provides better insight into what the cloud infrastructure service can do for your organization.
If you’re considering cloud infrastructure services, contact us at TailWind. We offer certified on-site technicians, making your transition to any cloud service a seamless process with expert support.
